(edited transcript)
Been a lot of commentary in the last couple days about Dr. Anthony Fauci taking the Fifth in this hearing room, in front of this McCarthyite committee dominated by awful Republicans who were just trying to score political points.
But I don’t think there’s been enough attention to Bobby Kennedy Jr., who’s the one who scoured the servers at HHS to come up with these diary entries and, you know, scored points by making Fauci look like he enjoyed taking Barbra Streisand’s call, as if this was this, you know, devastating smoking gun.
And I think what we need to do is just for a minute remind people of some of Kennedy’s history with Fauci.
Dr Anthony Fauci declined to answer questions at a Senate hearing on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. The former top US health official invoked his Fifth Amendment rights saying he feared Republican lawmakers could try to use his testimony to prosecute him for perjury.
So, in 2021, Kennedy wrote a book called The Real Anthony Fauci, which, unfortunately, went to number two on The New York Times bestseller list. In that book, he accused Fauci and Bill Gates of
personally profiting from drug sales in the developing world, which is a total lie;
accused Fauci of having a stake in Moderna, total lie;
and also —and this is the part that nobody remembers — accused Tony Fauci of murdering children.
Now, this book, The Real Anthony Fauci, is loaded with footnotes. So conspiracy theorists, other, you know, readers go, “Oh, it’s scholarly. It has all these footnotes.”
Check some of them out.
There’s one in particular from a woman named Celia Farber. She is the source —the daughter of Barry Farber, who was a rightwing talk show host in New York City.
And Celia Farber says — and Kennedy puts this in the book —that there’s a mass grave of children in Hawthorne, New York. She says, “Who were those kids? As far as I know, nobody has ever asked Dr. Fauci that haunting question.”
So this is the way they roll. They just raise questions. Is Tony Fauci a murderer of children?
And I just hope everybody keeps in mind, as we think about this really terrible hearing, which symbolized the war on science that is degrading one of the things that’s made this country great — our wonderful public health system, for all its flaws, our system of scientific inquiry.
And as we think back on the totality of this, we need to be sure to remember that history will regard Tony Fauci very favorably. As part of PEPFAR, he helped to save 20 million lives from AIDS abroad.
And they will remember Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a horrible secretary of HHS, where measles and other diseases surged, where he deprived people of their Medicare and Medicaid benefits because they lived in blue states, and because he used crackpot conspiracy theories to destroy, or at least try to harm, the reputation of a great American.
Here’s my short Then and Now convo with Princeton Professor Julian Zelizer, our latest weekly effort to convey some of the historical context of the news:
